In the early, self-improvement phase of the pandemic, people would some-times comment on the opportunities that lockdown presented for art and artists. They’d observe that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” during plague times, or that Tony Kushner and Larry Kramer snatched inspiration from the AIDS crisis. It was the slenderest of silver linings, jumbled up with terror and frustration—the idea that COVID might, if nothing else, produce enduring fiction.
Were the “Lear” people right? Four years after the virus began its worldwide demolition tour, the efforts of contemporary scribes of pestilence have borne fruit. A heterogeneous body of literature now attempts to catch the import of the period from roughly March, 2020, to the end of 2021. Authors have written erudite tragicomedies (“Our Country Friends,” by Gary Shteyngart), gentle ghost stories (“The Sentence,” by Louise Erdrich), and shape-shifting compendiums of feeling and memory (“The Vulnerables,” by Sigrid Nunez). The books are intimate and domestic (“Day,” by Michael Cunningham), poetic and psychoanalytic (“August Blue,” by Deborah Levy), stricken and timid (“The Limits,” by Nell Freudenberger), stylized and swaggering (“Blue Ruin,” by Hari Kunzru).
Denne historien er fra June 17, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra June 17, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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GET IT TOGETHER
In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will.
GAINING CONTROL
The frenemies who fought to bring contraception to this country.
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has—at least at first—an air of glamour.
AGAINST THE CURRENT
\"Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,\" at Soho Rep, and \"Gatz,\" at the Public.
METAMORPHOSIS
The director Marielle Heller explores the feral side of child rearing.
THE BIG SPIN
A district attorney's office investigates how its prosecutors picked death-penalty juries.
THIS ELECTION JUST PROVES WHAT I ALREADY BELIEVED
I hate to say I told you so, but here we are. Kamala Harris’s loss will go down in history as a catastrophe that could have easily been avoided if more people had thought whatever I happen to think.
HOLD YOUR TONGUE
Can the world's most populous country protect its languages?
A LONG WAY HOME
Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone's house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice.
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”